All Fall Down (7 page)

Hell, she thought dismally as night closed in on the celebration and she wandered down to the dock with Sarah, sleeping peacefully in her arms while Cait helped other respectable matrons of the town dish up homemade ice cream before the fireworks display started in half an hour, she would be satisfied now with just a man who was neither involved with someone else, like John, nor married and trying to have an affair, or with one who wanted to do more than sit in a local bar drinking beer after beer as he told her about his hunting and fishing exploits. She had been a fool to renew her contract at the school and the lease on her apartment for another year, she fumed silently. What on earth had she been thinking of? she wondered. Her attachment to Cait and Sarah? Well, she couldn’t live on that forever. It was time to leave Sinclair and start her own life again. Instead she was trapped for another year, and she had no one but herself to blame.

She slipped off her shoes and sat down on the dock. Sarah squirmed and whimpered in her arms, then relaxed again into openmouthed baby sleep. Blaine smiled into her oblivious face. “I wish you were mine,” she whispered. Sarah blew a saliva bubble. Blaine sighed and dangled her bare feet off the dock into the lake water. The water was so cool. If she were alone, she would take off all her clothes, slip into the water, and swim her depression away. But she was surrounded by hundreds of people.

“You look like you could use this.”

She jerked her head around to see a man in the semidarkness. His face was lean, tanned, smiling. Even his blue eyes smiled at her. Martin Avery. Everyone in town knew Martin Avery. “What did you say?” she asked stupidly.

“I said, you look like you could use this.” He held out a bowl of homemade ice cream. “Of course, it would be better with some Drambuie or Grand Marnier on top, but such delights are not being served tonight.” Blaine stared at him in surprise, and he laughed softly. “Here, let me hold the baby while you eat.”

“Thank you.” He set the bowl of ice cream beside her, perched himself so close to her on the dock she imagined she could feel the warmth his golden-tanned arms gave off, and deftly took the baby from her. Sarah started to wail, broke off in the middle as if reconsidering, and went back to sleep.

“This is very nice of you, Mr. Avery,” Blaine said, digging into the ice cream.

“It’s Martin. And it’s not so nice. I remember you so well when you were a youngster. You used to come to my house with your father and work like a little demon right beside him. He got paid, but you didn’t.”

Blaine felt her cheeks flame at the memory of those days, one in particular when she was thirteen. Gloria, Martin’s delicately beautiful wife, had come out, stopped her as she was raking up grass her father had just mown, and said, “I have some old clothes of mine I don’t wear anymore. They’re out of style, but I’m very small and you’re a big girl for your age, and you certainly look like you need them.”

Mr. Avery had been sitting on the deck, and he lowered his newspaper, staring at them both with his clear, electric-blue eyes. Humiliated, Blaine had said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Avery, but I have all the clothes I need.”

Later, as she and her father were leaving, they’d passed an open window. Blaine could hear Mr. Avery nearly shouting, “Why the hell did you offer that girl your old clothes?”

“I was only trying to help,” Mrs. Avery had shot back. “Good Lord, she looks like a ragamuffin, like some orphan out of Dickens. You don’t resent my being generous, do you?”

“I don’t resent your being generous. I
do
resent your being cruel, and that’s exactly what you were doing. You’ve got a lot more tact than to tell the kid she looks like she
needs
your old clothes. You mortified her.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Avery had said. “That girl should have been grateful. Her problem is that she’s got a lot of pride her kind doesn’t have a right to.”

“Her
kind?
Jesus, Gloria, maybe you’d have been happier living on a plantation in the old South. Then you could have gone around humiliating the slaves every day…”

Mrs. Avery had burst into tears. “Don’t talk to me that way! I’m getting pains in my chest. I’ve always had a bad heart. I’m not supposed to get upset, and here you are yelling at me because you think I was tactless to some little nothing of a girl
you’re
defending because you think she’s
pretty
. They don’t come too young for
you
, do they?”

Blaine’s father had bowed his head while Blaine fought hot tears of embarrassment as they moved past the window. A few months later, when Gloria Avery died of a heart attack, Blaine felt tremendous guilt because of that summer day when she’d wished the woman dead.

And now, all these years later, Martin Avery was serving her ice cream on the dock and holding her sister’s baby. Blaine suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say to the man, but luckily he kept talking, as if he understood her discomfort. “The fort’s quite a project, but it ought to bring in a lot of tourists. This town needs something to stimulate the economy.”

“Yes.” Blaine glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He looked slightly older than he had when her father had done his yard work, but he was still slim, goldenhaired, and blue-eyed, with intense magnetism and energy. She suddenly thought of him leaping over a tennis net in triumph at Monaco or coming in first in the Grand Prix. The privilege he’d been reared with seemed to circle him like an aura, even as he sat on a splintery dock holding a baby whose diaper was undoubtedly wet by now. “The only thing thriving in town at the moment is Avery Manufacturing,” she remarked.

“That’s right. But we can’t support a whole town.”

The ice cream was much richer than what she bought in the store and so cold it made her teeth hurt in a pleasant way. She hadn’t eaten homemade ice cream since she was a child.

Martin Avery looked out over the water. “I was sorry about your father.”

Blaine swallowed quickly. “Thank you. And thank you for the flowers. There weren’t a lot at the funeral.” She immediately regretted the last remark, thinking it sounded self-pitying, but the man didn’t look uncomfortable.

“I was out of town, or I would have come,” he said easily. “I always liked your dad.”

She stared at him. “You did?”

“Sure. Sometimes, when you weren’t along, he’d share a drink with me after he finished the yard work. He was a smart man, Blaine.”

“Yes, he was. Very smart,” she said stiffly, then added, on a warmer, more intimate note that surprised her, “He just couldn’t channel his intelligence.”

“We all have our weaknesses.”

And what weaknesses could you possibly have? Blaine wondered, turning her eyes back to her ice cream. He seemed perfect, bigger than life, a character out of a movie. How could he possibly understand that Jim O’Connor had been a man driven by dreams that his lack of education and his alcoholism had never allowed him to accomplish? And yet she felt Martin
did
know.

“I hear you’re doing an excellent job at the school.”

“I try. But who keeps you apprised of my performance?”

Crinkles appeared around his eyes when he smiled. “I’m on the school board.”

“Oh, I forgot.”

“I’m glad you’ve decided to stay. My daughter, Robin, will be starting Sinclair High next year. I’d like to think of her having you for English, although her strong point is music.”

“You won’t be sending her away to private school?”

He shook his head. “No. I was shipped off to private school when I was young, and I resented it terribly. All my friends were here. Besides, Robin is all I have.”

“Why didn’t you ever remarry?” Blaine asked, immediately horrified at the bluntness of her question.

Martin, though, threw back his head and laughed. “Just as direct as your father was.” The baby kicked, opened her mouth, and let out a piercing cry. Blaine finished her ice cream and set the bowl aside, then reached for the baby, who settled back into her arms with only minor fussing.

“Sorry about that,” Martin said.

“It’s okay. I’m surprised she’s as quiet as she is, considering how noisy it is around the lake. I suggested taking her home, but Cait wants her to stay and see the fireworks.”

Martin frowned. “What is she, six months old?”

“Seven. And I know—it’s silly. She’ll either ignore the fireworks or be frightened half to death by them, but Cait can be stubborn.”

Blaine stuck a pacifier in the baby’s mouth, and Sarah fell quiet again.

“I haven’t met the right woman,” Martin said.

“What?”

“You asked why I haven’t married again after Gloria. I was just answering your question.”

“Oh. I’m sorry I asked something so personal. I feel like a fool.”

A welcome breeze drifted through the night air, lifting her hair from her neck. Something nibbled at her toes, probably one of the few fish recently dumped into the new lake, and she kicked, then lifted her bare legs from the cold water, tucking them under the full skirt of her sundress.

“Would you have dinner with me, Blaine?”

She looked into the electric-blue eyes. They were smiling, but they were also sincere. Incredible as it seemed, he wasn’t joking. She swallowed. “I’d love to, Mr.…Martin,” she said.

Seven months later, on December 15, Blaine’s twenty-seventh birthday, they were married. They honeymooned in the Caribbean and returned in time for Christmas. Martin’s Christmas presents to Blaine had been a golden retriever puppy and a white Mercedes. She was delighted with the dog, but claimed the car was far too grand for her to drive to Sinclair High. Martin, however, insisted. She was beautiful, she was brilliant, she was meant to have the best. She’d brought love and youth and excitement back into his life. And their life
was
exciting, with surprise trips, parties and cookouts, endless bouquets of yellow roses, beautiful clothes, and the passionate love of a man she’d admired since childhood. She felt like a princess. Except for Robin’s coolness toward her, the next two years had been idyllic, and only hours before that fateful New Year’s Eve party, which Blaine still couldn’t think about without a shudder, she and Martin had decided to have a baby.

Now it was all gone—the happiness, the security, the love—all snatched away because someone had sped through a stop sign on a snowy night and plowed into Martin’s Ferrari. Blaine turned onto her side, forcing her eyes shut. “Don’t think about it,” she said aloud. “Don’t think about what you’ve lost or how Martin came to hate you, or you’ll go crazy.” Down the hall Robin’s stereo still throbbed, and Blaine concentrated on the music, finally floating to sleep with the music of Heart.

3

Blaine pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine, and took a deep breath. Was she ready to face Martin? He’d told her his paralysis was her fault. Finally he’d actually said what she knew he felt. And when she’d argued with him, told him they should have taken the Bronco to the dance instead of his fast, flimsy sports car, he’d grown furious, shouting invectives and hurling a heavy glass ashtray at her. Not at her, she realized now, nearly three hours later. He’d hurled it in her direction, just to frighten her, just to vent his anger. So she’d stormed out. But she shouldn’t have done that, no matter how he’d provoked her. Martin was in no mental condition to be left alone, even for a short time
.

The front door was locked. Blaine was puzzled. Bernice never left the door locked, and she was due to arrive twenty minutes after Blaine had left. But then, Bernice’s car was not outside. Maybe a friend had driven her. Maybe she’d taken a cab. Or maybe she’d not come at all, a damning voice inside Blaine’s head said. Maybe something had happened and Martin had been alone all this time
.

Fear rushed through Blaine, cramping her stomach muscles. She used her key to open the front door. Inside, the air conditioner hummed in the big, quiet house. It was unusually hot for late May, as hot as it had been the May when Martin came into her life again. On a couple of days the temperature had reached the nineties. Maybe the weather moved in three-year cycles, she thought irrelevantly
.

She walked into the living room, her glance flying to the pile of dark blue glass lying on the pale oak floor, remnants of the ashtray Martin had thrown. She should have cleaned up the mess before Bernice came. But if the woman had come, she would have picked up the glass. Bernice was not here, had never been here today
.

“Martin?” Blaine called tentatively. “Martin, where are you?” The house was too quiet. Not even Ashley was around to greet her. Her breath quickened. Something was wrong. The house seemed to throb with trouble. She stood totally still in the living room, listening, feeling. Trouble. Then she heard the whining behind Martin’s closed study door. With growing dread she opened it, and Ashley burst out, circling her legs, barking in agitation. “What is it?” Blaine asked, her voice edged with fear. “Where’s Martin?” She looked inside the study. It was empty, but the stench of something burning filled the air. Blaine walked to the metal wastepaper basket beside his desk and saw the charred remains of two leather-bound books—Martin’s journals, she later realized. The journals he’d obsessively written in the past few weeks had been reduced to scorched covers, the pages consumed by fire
.

While she stared at the still smoldering books, Ashley bounded to the French doors. She barked and whined until Blaine followed her, watching as the dog stood on her hind legs, the nails on her front paws tearing at the sheer voile curtain panels. “Stop that!” Blaine commanded. She ran to the dog, forcing her away from the doors. Then she saw Martin, slumped in his wheelchair on the deck
.

Slowly she walked outside. The smooth boards of the sun deck were hot beneath her thin-soled shoes. It must be ninety today, she thought distantly. Martin shouldn’t be out in this heat. Maybe he’d fainted…

Then Ashley went to him, licking his limp hand. Blaine glanced down to see a familiar revolver lying on the hot boards beside him. But that wasn’t possible, she thought. She’d locked the gun cabinet and hidden the key in her jewelry box. But there was the gun, shining and deadly in the afternoon sun. Chills raced up and down her arms in spite of the heat. There was the gun.
There was the gun,
her mind screamed. Finally she raised her eyes. They focused on the ragged, blackened hole in Martin’s right temple as the world filled with brilliant sunshine and the shrill, monotonous buzzing of seventeen-year cicadas in the trees beyond
.